History

LITERATURE AND DESIRE

Margarida Lieblich Losa*

§1. WHY FICTIONAL LITERATURE IS NOT TO BE READ LITERALY

Bai (to write)
Chun (spring; life and vitality; love; lust; stirrings of love)
Diàn (to establish, to settle; make offerings to the spirits of the dead)
Zun (to respect; revere; venerate; venerable; honorable;a title of respect; an ancient wine vessel)

1.1. THE IRREPLACEABLE INDIVIDUAL AUTHOR

Even according to Émile Zola, the most naturalist of writers, the novelist who depicts a portion of reality ("[...] un coin de la nature [...]") must do it through has own personality ("[...] à travers le temperament [...]").1 In the process of literary creation the writer's 'raw materials' are intertwined with his/her own ideological interpretations and emotional preferences. This is one of the reasons why writers are considered the authors of their works and are entitled to copyright. From this evidence it follows that when we wish to describe the textual contents of a literary work, we ought to keep in mind that, somehow, it includes its author, and that this is so when the is not a single word testifying to it. 2

If fact, authors, because they have personalities, rather than depict a portion of reality they react to it. This provides the literary text with an in trinsic 'duality' of content. Even when, in appearance, it is either strictly objective or, on the contrary, strictly fictional, it incorporates an 'indivisible' presence: the author's. Because it is unique and irreplaceable this presence provides the work of art with a lasting 'aura' of originality. 3 Readers and their interpretations will vary but while the 'aura' lasts the work remains somehow attached to its source. The author(s) radiates from the text itself an, if nothing else, the style of the work testifies to it. The style is an important part of the concept of the literary work.

1.2. THE EXTRATEXTUAL CONTEXT

A second reason why a work of fiction cannot be read literally has to do with the fact that it does not exist in a social void. Writers presuppose that certain things are known to their readers. They may even be unaware of their own presuppositions because as members of a given cultural community they take them for granted. On the other hand, writers do not wish to repeat what others have already done because their trade requires 'originality'. The stigma of epigonism is anathema to an artist's reputation. Novelty is part of the consumer's 'horizon of expectations', even those consumers who are likely to defend aesthetic traditions they know best. 4 Without having to make it explicit, authors react against what is already in existence in the field, generating thereby a sort of negative 'intertextuality'.5 The latter, to, will become a kind of 'invisible' subject matter to which an informed 'community of readers' respond while other communities,unaware of such intertextuality, will not. 6 Making it brief, under contextualization we may subsume factors such as cultural codes, literary conventions, aesthetic trends, political constraints and market demands. 7 The author will be writing within a given cultural 'system' — even when he is reacting against it — but nothing in the text will have to say so explicitly. (As we all know, an important part of the teaching of literature consists in informing the students abut such historical contexts). Allow me to conclude from the above, then, that an important part of the meaning of the literary work is inferred from its extratextual context. It has been said, namely Nietzsche (or so I am told) that "[...] we have art so that we do not perish of truth." 8 Inverting this formula we could equally declare that we need truth in order to bring life to fiction.

1.3. THE DUALITY OF FICTION: MANIFEST VERSUS LATENT CONTENT

A third important reason why literary fiction is not to be read literally is based on the fact that what actually appears written on the page is not necessarily what the work is saying. 9 There is particular duplicity in the literary text. First, as Michael Riffaterre, for example, succinctly explained in his essay on undecidability, the construction of meaning is a gradual and in part retroactive acquisition. 10 The reader 'travels' with the text and the total cues to its understanding are realized only at the end. This is the more so when texts have plots as in the case of narrative dramatic fiction. 11 This dynamics of reading explains how one sentence can mean something at one stage of reading, and if we reread it, something else in a subsequent stage. But the idea of duplicity, as well as those of metaphoricity and ineffability, imply more than a mere dynamics of reading. In his Le Roman Naturaliste, Zola spoke of the writer as an "experimentalism". In a different manner from the lab scientist — whom Zola wished to emulate ~- the writer's experiment consisted in letting the character speak and act on their own, as it were, leading readers to discover by themselves the laws that governed those characters' behaviour. 12 It was not the writer's job to spell that out. Several writers have stressed this principle that the text must speak for itself, from which we infer that there is a meaning to be extracted from the text which the author does not feel he should put into word. It has not to be discovered and appropriated by the reader. The cooption of the reader to participate in the diagnosis of the text's semantic content enhances not only the dialogic nature of fiction but also aesthetic fruition itself. Naturally, this hide-and-seek strategy entails the risk that different readers will infer diferent meanings from what is left unsaid. It is a 'calculated risk', one on which the value of fiction as aesthetic object probably depends. This is also why, among other consequences, a good work of art is seldom very reliable propaganda (as much as art and propaganda have been close partners throughout history), and good, reliable propaganda is usually an impoverished substitute for art. By contrast the very flexibility of meaning of the literary text is probably what causes it to be more easily transposed to another culture.

Borrowing the terms from Sigmund Freud's theory of the interpretation of dreams, the esthetic object, like the dream has one "[...] manifest content [...]" and a different conceptual content under the surface, the "[...] latent content [...]." The latter is the 'true content' or rather 'the content of truth' which lies inside fiction. (If we accept the value of interpretation as a kind of 'unmasking', then the latent content can be defined as the non-fictional residue of the fictional text.) Fiction is the alibi of the "[...] latent content [...]", as it were. 13 In this connection one suspects that fiction lies, invents, disguises or simply 'distances' itself from the real world so as to elude the repressing powers that exist in that world and better probe the meanders of human and social truths. 14

Literary fiction is related to the world of dreams, day-dreams, creeds and, in sort, desires. When someone imagines the fulfillment of desire and then presents that fulfillment to others as if it had actually occurred he/she is either lying of 'fictionalizing'. In this sense fiction has a power of its own. It is intertwined with human culture at large in complex way. Fiction of all sort, posing as reality, circulate among us so to give vent to our aspirations and fears at the same time they are kept under cover. From a sociological and political point of view, as a means of intersubjective communication whose consequences are difficult for anyone to access fictional text are often deemed dangerous, pernicious, addictive or, to say the least, irresponsible.

In the sense I am proposing now, it is irrelevant to distinguish between fantastic and realistic literature. In this sense all fiction, even the most fantastic, is realistic because it bases itself on the figuration power of the mind, on our capacity of putting into articulated speech what has been imagined. Whether the author chooses to represent the realist world of the suffering ignorant workers as did John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), or the fantastic life of a labgenerated monster as did Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (1818), what is being conveyed to the readers is a figuration of human suffering. Steinbeck's metaphor, by taking its raw materials from historical reality, operates with an "[...] effet de réel [...]", to use Barthes expression. 15 Shelley's metaphor operates with an effect of the uncanny and the fantastic, and part of her raw materials, as she herself claimed, were taken from a dream she had. In more senses than one both novels are parables because they tell a tale on the surface and convey 'a very different story' underneath. Not all readers verbalize or 'interpret' the 'story' underneath. But even when they do not they will have already responded to it emtionally, 'understanding' and sympathizing with both the monster's point of view and that of Tom Joad's and his migrant family. 16

1.4. A DIALOGIC INSTRUMENT

Let us focus for a moment on what can be called the dialectical nature of reception. As the text goes out of the author' hands it undergoes a process of negation by the reader so that the meaning emerges as a kind of synthesis of the positions of both entities. In Albert Camus's formulation of this dialectical process, in art, to name a need is already an imaginary surpassing of that need and that is why "[...] even if the novel speaks only f nostalgia, despair, the unachieved, it still creates the form and the salvation. To name despair is already to go beyond it."17 One way of explaining this phenomenon is the following: authors presuppose the existence of unfulfilled desires for happiness in their readers. So, while they ostensively write about sorrows they implicitly commune with their readers about the desire that such sorrows ought not to exist. Exposing what one fears or dislikes can have the effect of an exorcism. Conversely, the writing about pink worlds of wish-fulfilment, because it establishes a depressing contrast with a not so appetizing reality, may be either received as parody or else become an addictive enterprise inducing desire in the reader for more escapist, vicarious wish-fulfillment. This dialectical nature of reception is what explains, for example, that naturalist novels dealing with human degradation can be read, and as a rule were meant to be read, as literature of protest. Much more could be said about the dialectical and cathartic nature of reception but we will have to postpone this discussion until another occasion. 18

Fictional literature is therefore intrinsically and extrinsically ironic: it is likely to mean something other than what it says and the reader is likely to have to understand something others that what is written. The two ironies may not coincide because the text is to be confronted with the reader's real world and that may no longer be the same as the world with which the author expected the text to be confronted. In any case much is to be inferred from the confrontation. More likely than not the irony implicit in literary fiction is of a romantic nature since it feeds on needs, frustration and desire.

So, this fourth reason why fictional literature is not to be read literally resides in the fact that it is a form of communication and of confrontation. The text is addressing someone and that someone is going to set the text against the real world he/she lives in. This happens even when the implicit dialogue takes place across a gulf of unknown barriers. The actualized meaning of the message fluctuate according to who, when and where the receiver is. One thing is certain, however, and the writer knows it: the receiver is always someone different from himself/herself. In fact, not only will bring into the reading a different personality of 'temperament' and, often, a different explicatory context, he/she will also project his/her own authorship, as it were, into the text. Readers select what is important for them: they retain certain scenes and characters and neglect to take notice of theirs. Some readers might identify with a certain protagonist, other identify with another, and so on. Reading is a process ridden with unconscious projections. Readers understand only what they can understand. No reader is 'innocent'. In this sense every reading is a personalized 'misreading' and even authors themselves misread their own work.

It should be noted, however, that authors are the first to know the game they are playing. They know they are speaking on behalf of as well as for a plurality of readers. In modern times, they know about the existence of different world views and so it is likely that they will construct the text so as to possibilitate the dialogue with a wide spectrum of readers. As Bakhtin so thoroughly investigated, modern fictional texts, as opposed to pre-modern fictional texts, such as the epic poem or the mythical tale, are intrinsically multilingual. After the era of the maritime Discoveries, if not before authors dare to hope that their texts will travel far ad wide among different cultures. I will retire to this issue in the second part of my paper.**

§2. WHY FICTIONAL LITERATURE PROMOTES INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE

"In this way the simple story I had heard developed into a story of dimensions huge enough to encompass a whole society."

In: LAO She, How I came to write the novel Camel Xiangzi, (1937/1945).

"To read The Black and the Red, and Lucien Leuwen is to know that France as if one were living there, to read Anna Karenina is to know that Russia. [...] I decided to give the ideological 'feel' of our mid-century."

In LESSING, Doris, The Golden Notebook, (1962/1972) [Preface].

2.1. [INTRODUCTION]

After having reviewed some of the reasons in favour of the argument that fictional literature is not to be read literally, I will now be considering the apparent paradox of how the very same fictional literature whose literal meaning is irrelevant or even non existant — in spite of the well-ordered words on the page — nonetheless, historically speaking has been a privileged ambassador between different cultures.

As quoted in the epigraph, Lao She tells us in his 1945 Afterward to Camel Xiangzi how in the process of planing the story he "[...] began to consider that a rickshaw puller like everyone else would have problems other than to simply his daily bread. He would have ideals and desires, a family and children. How would he solve these problems? How could he? In this way, the simple story I had heard developed into a story of dimensions huge enough to encompass a whole society."19 And in fact this widely translated book became a sort of intercultural introduction to prerevolutionary China and, indirectly, to the circumstances that brought about the [1949] Revolution. Doris Lessing, a contemporary British writer born in 1919, twenty years after Lao She, wrote that she had come to know nineteenth-century Russia through reading Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and nineteenth century France through reading Stendhal's novels. She declared that her intention in writing her own novel, The Golden Notebook, was to achieve a similar goal concerning mid-century European civilization. And I believe that she succeeded even if, at the more obvious level, the story turns around the psychological breakdown of the main protagonist, Anne Wulf. Counting the pages in the edition I own, there are six hundred and thirty eight pages about a woman's emotional breakdown after she decides to quit her political party and, on the same day, the man she loves decides to leave her. Another way of reading the novel is to see that it is about the failure of revolutionary ideals in Europe. Naturally there are many ways of understanding the novel. As Lessing herself recognizes with misgivings in the Preface to he 1972 edition, the novel became a bestseller mainly because it was appropriated by the feminist movement. Her feminine point of view is in fact, an important ingredient of the book too. To cut a long argument short, the question I will try to answer is: How can a single novel be so pertinent to so many people and be so relevant to our understanding of the non-fictional reality of a given historical period? I will divide my attempt to answer this question in four points.

2.2. THE UNIVERSAL UNDERGROUND THEME

Human beings aspire to happiness. To be happy they require food, shelter, health, freedom of movement, love, affection, social integration and the sense of individual worth and dignity. No civilization known to us to this day has found a way of providing this kind of happiness for all its citizens. It is normally believed that, on earth, this is impossible, utopia. Because fiction in general draws its basic sustenance from human imagination it is understandable that in every culture the unfulfilled desire for happiness should seek imaginary compensation. It does so in religion, in art and in play. 20 There are no historical or geographical barriers to be considered in this respect. It is a universal source of fictionalizing. If there is a multitude of ways in which human beings can seek imaginary compensation for the insufficiencies of realties, there is nonetheless this thematic original source which literary works of fiction everywhere, at all times, share. 21 This shared germinating ground (or let us preferably call it 'underground') facilitates the understanding of surface variations that each individual literary work makes manifest. Our desires may appear complex as visible ephiphenomena but they are in all likelihood much simpler at the basic biological, deep-psychological level. It is probably because they share this subjective, emotionally-charged 'underground' that works of fiction are more easily accepted than non-fictional expository texts when they are made to travel across geographical and temporal boundaries. In this manner, as a kind of side-effect, hey often contribute to introduce foreign cultures to each other.

It has been written that fiction has the capacity to defamiliarize the familiar, that is, to make us look around ourselves with new eyes. By the same token fiction also has the capacity to familiarize us with the unfamiliar, to make us accept what we do not know. 22 This is perhaps because we expect literary fiction to be about other worlds anyway. In a sense, fictional worlds are always new to us. The writer of fiction is excepted to lead us to see known things as though for the first time of unknown thing as though in recognition: defamiliarizing the familiar is correlative with familiarizing us with the unfamiliar. (This may be one of the reasons why travelogues, or intimate diaries and memoirs, or certain journalistic columns of gossip, though not fiction, are read as if they were fiction: they familiarize us with the unfamiliar.)23 To know about the other, the foreign culture for example, is also a way of making us see ourselves in a new light. (This, by the way, is one of the motivations behind Comparative Literature studies). In a certain sense, fiction writers are always introducing the reader to a 'foreign world', and so they are prepared to act as guides. In their trade it is natural to became an ambassador between cultures. 24

2.2. THE INTRINSIC DIALOGISM OF FICTION

Extrinsically speaking, fiction is a dialogic instrument in the sense that the author (either one individual or a restricted number of individuals working in conjunction), addresses an indefinite number of recipients. This communicative function is part of the strategy of literary production in general. I would like to call your attention now, however, to the intrinsic dialogism of narrative fiction, such as Bakhtin has defined it in his essays. 25 More distinctively, since the Renaissance, narrative fiction is a literary genre characterized by a 'dialogue' between a speaking subject, personified, for example, in the omniscient narrator or in one of the protagonists as a surrogate for the author, and the represented Other, personified in the other protagonists and characters in general. The Subject, the implicit and explicit I, is directly experienced from the inside; and the Object, the Other, is observed from the outside. In addition the latter also functions as a mirror for the I who cannot otherwise perceive itself from the outside. This structuring dialogue between two qualitatively different points of view is part of the expressive/mimetic nature of fiction.

Because it departs from this intrinsic conflict of points of view, and because, extrinsically, it is also addressing itself to a diffuse, often unpredictable Other, literary fiction, at least that of a "readable" sort, 26contrary to monological literature or political and religious propaganda, turns out to be, indeed, a good vehicle for promoting intercultural and inter-ideological dialogue. This is so even when one observes the author's counterbalancing propensity for reinforcing their authorial and authoritative points of view, subordinating other voices to their own voice so that, as we will observe next, the work's identity is retained and with it its distinctive 'aura' as well.

2.3. THE AUTHOR'S AUTHORITY AND THE 'UMBILICAL AURA' OF THE WORK

The more the author predicts that his/her tale will travel far and wide, the more he/she will try to saturate the text with all possible pointers to what is deemed to be its essential message. In this manner the text will remain the author's text and retain the 'aura' of its origin. So that if much is 'undecidable' in terms of the effect the text will generate on the reader, and also because the reader is an unknown variable, much is also decisively interwoven into the text so that a certain amount of self-sufficiency is attached to it before it separates itself from its originator. As Roland Barthes has maintained in reaction to his analysis of Honoré de Balzac's tale Sarracine in S/Z, the so-called "readable" text is over-determined as to the message it is supposed to convey. In this manner the reader, the very embodiment of the Other, will be forced to establish a 'dialogue' with the tightly knit text, never his/her own text, even across temporal, geographical and cultural borders, and will not easy miss the core of its message. The changing interpretations which we perceive to be possible of one and the same text have as a corollary the stability of its core content. The 'manifest content' impregnated as it may be with transient historical information, is prone to acquire ever new colourings and meanings. The 'latent content', on the other hand ought to be more resilient. It is closer to the deep structure of the work. It permits the latter not only to survive a multiplicity of interpretations but also to undergo transition into other language and other media without ceasing to be itself.

2.4. REDUNDANCY AND INTERNAL COHERENCE

Barthes showed how repetition and redundancy makes it almost impossible for any reader of Sarrasine to miss its cumulative central theme: the uncanny articulation of castration with beauty. This happens irrespectively of the manner in which readers interpret this same articulation and independently of its having any particular significance for them. I would venture to propose that the more ineffable the message the more redundant and coherent must be the text. Taking as an example just two pages of D.H. Lawrence's 1921 expressionist novel Women in Love describing an amorous encounter, I counted eight instances of the word "dark" or its derivatives, four of the word "mystery", eight of the adjective "strange", and five of phrases relating the concept of 'electricity' to that of 'love'.27 It will be difficult for any reader not to understand the author's concern with the importance of, but also his fear about the ominously evanescent character of sexual passion between a man and a woman. Whether the reader finds this a meaningful, significant interpretation of love is another matter.

In an altogether different style, semantic overdeterminaton of the core literary content is also evident in Lao She's social realist novel Camel Xiangzi.28 There can be no doubt that the central message of the book is reinforced chapter after chapter, making readers understand that the Xiangzis of this word deserve a better fate. Xiangzi's obsession with owning his own rickshaw is a metaphor for the cruelest realities: not even such a wretched dream as owning one's rickshaw is fulfillable within the boundaries of an exploitative class society, a society in which an affluent minority lives off the dehumanized labour of the majority off the population. Whether or not readers will infer a plea for social revolution from the parabolical structure of the story, they will certainly not misunderstand the message that the Xiangzis of this world deserve a better fate. Unless they dismiss the novel altogether, readers will identify and sympathize with Xiangzi unrrespectively of which class cultural group or country they belong to. The core message will resist alternative interpretations and, in addition, the novel will continue transporting its cultural and historical contents across national borders and continents an beyond its original social and political context.

2.5. THE SELF-SUFFICIENCY OF THE FICTIONAL TEXT

I have pointed out four aspects which I believe are relevant to my argument that fiction has a distinctive quality to promote intercultural dialogue:

1. The transtemporal and transcutural universality of the basic 'underground' themes, relating to compensating unfulfilled desires though the imagination;

2. The intrinsic 'dialogism' of fiction which leads readers to confront themselves with the point of view of the Other;

3. The 'umbilical' relation of the fictional text to it authorial/authoritative source, which preserves its 'aura' as an irreplaceable object; and

4. The redundancy and coherence of fictional works which provides them with a resilience that facilitates geographical and temporal transplantation.

These four characteristics may be subsumed under a single one, that of the so-called 'autonomy' or 'self-sufficiency' of the fictional text. Literary works of fiction are not just documents of a given historical period; they are also monuments to it. Their resilient nature allows them to continue to yeld meaning to different historical publics. They are capable of encapsulating a great amount of information about a particular day and age, or about a given cultural tradition and of making it travel far and wide, because such information, which might otherwise be misunderstood or found unacceptable, is articulate with the more enduring, imaginary world of fulfilled desire. This alternative world of fiction is not only dense and cohesive in its metaphoric nature, it also deals in human emotion and affect, indispensable ingredients for the preservation and applicability of knowledge. 29

When Lao She wrote Camel Xiangzi he probably had in mind not only the ethical usefulness of lending his voice to the abused, illiterate workers but also the pragmatic possibility of using fiction to inform readers from better off social strata and, possibly, from other nations as well, about the untenable conditions in which the majority of the Chinese people were living. So much has happened since then and yet, in its consistent stark simplicity, the novel permits today's reader not only to travel back in time and understand what China was like before the Revolution (and perhaps, too why the Revolution had to happen), but also, at the same time, it permits him/her to confront Xiangzi's destiny with the destiny of our world of today. At the same time as it introduces readers to cultural aspects of a given period of Chinese history which they may find unfamiliar and exotic, the novel also establishes an 'underground dialogue' with probably every reader on the universal theme of the search for human happiness. Several details and secondary meanings may escape the reader, especially the reader who, like us, must use a translation, but the tragic irony of Xiangzi's frustrated desire to become an established rickshaw owner is so much emphasized that it is impossible to miss the unwritten yet overcoded message that the honest, hard-working Xiangzis of this world deserve a better fate. The story is also a metaphor. Besides being his own fictional self— a simple, honest, stubborn young man of a few word — Xiangzi, a struggling and guiltless Sisyphus of the Beijing slums, barely surviving in an inhumane environment — is also all and any of us. The immutable, intrafictional world of he rickshaw puller provokes an ongoing, unending, unpredictable dialogue with ever-changing, extra-fictional reality, inviting us to see how many Xiangzis there still are in this world of ours and leading us to ask about ourselves how can this be and what is to be done about it. That fictional texts are capable of leading us to formulate such uncomfortable questions is one more reason why, in my opinion they are such great ambassadors of cultures. ***

This paper was first published with the following editorial references:

LOSA, Margarida Lieblich, Literature and Desire, in LEE, Mabel - HUA, Meng, eds., "Cultural Dialogue and Misreading", (University of Sidney World Literature Series No. 1), Sydney, Wild Peony, 1997, pp. 279-289.

International distribution:

University of Hawaii Press, ISBN: 0 9586526 1 9 (papercover 422 pp.).

Wei

(to do; act; a hand leading an elephant)

NOTES

Revised version of the paper:

LOSA, Margarida L., Why Fictional Literature is not to be Read Literally, in THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CULTURAL DIALOGUE AND CULTURAL MISREADING, Beijing, Beijing University, 9-11 October 1995, -[Oral communication...].

*** Revised version of the paper:

LOSA, Margarida L., Why Fictional Literature Promotes Intercultural Dialogue, in ENCONTRO INTERNACIONAL "DIÁLOGO CULTURAL E DIFICULDADES DE ENTENDIMENTO" (COLLOQUIUM ON CULTURAL DIALOGUE AND CULTURAL MISUNDERSTANDING), Macao, Instituto Cultural de Macau - Fundação Oriente, 13-14 October 1995 - [Oral communication... ].

See: SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY — for the following authors and further titles of authors already mentioned in this article: BOOTH, Wayne; CAMUS, Albert; RIFFATERRE, Michael.

1 Le Naturalisme au Théatre, in GUEDJ, André, ed., "Le Roman Expérimental", Paris, Garnier-Flammarion, 1971, p. 140.

See: FURST, Lilian - SKRINE, Peter N., Naturalism, London, 1971, p.48 — Where the authors make reference that the same phrase occurs in other essays by Zola as, for example, in Mes Haines.

2 BAKHTIN, Mikhail, Speech Genres and Other Essays, Austin/Texas, University of Texas Press, 1896 — For my understanding of the author's 'excedentary' presence in the literary text.

3 BENJAMIN, Walter, The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction, in "Illuminations", New York, Schocken Books, 1969 [1st edition of the text, 1936] — For the concept of the 'aura'.

4 JAUSS, Hans-Robert, Literary history as a challenge to literary theory, in "Towards an Aesthetic of Reception", Minneapolis, University of Minnesota, 1982 [1stedition of the text, 1969] — For the theoretical concept of "horizon of expectations".

5 BLOOM, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry, New York - Oxford - et al, Oxford University Press, 1973 — On negative intertextuality and "poetic misprision".

6 FISH, Stanley, Interpreting the Variorum and Is There a Text in This Class?, in "Is There a Text in this Class? The Authority on Interpretive Communities", Cambridge/ Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1980 — For the theoretical discussion on 'communities of readers".

7 All these aspects are studied nowadays in conjunction under the general label of 'systemic studies'.

9 SANDOR, Andréas, On Idealistic Realism, in "Mosaic", 4(4) 1971, p.38 — I have been unable to trace the location of this quotation in Nietzche's work.

10 ISER, Wolfgang, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, p.45 — "Effect and response arise from a dialectical relsationship between showing and concealing — in other words from the difference between what is said and what is meant." Iser's book is a thoroughly theoretical discussion of this question.

10 COLLIER, Peter - GEYER-RYAN, Helga, eds.,Undecidability and hermeneutic constraint, in "Literary Theory Today", Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1990.

11 Or so we have been telling ourselves in the West at least since we studied Aristotle's definitions.

See: MINER, Earl, Comparative Poetics: An Intercultural Essay on Theories of Literature, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1990 — The author brings up the question that there can be narrative without plot, exemplifying this view with the Japanese monogatari among the types of literary texts.

12 LAO She, How I came to write the novel Camel Xiangzi, in "Camel Xiangzi", Beijing, Foreign Language Press, 1988, p.233 [1945 Afterword] — "Once I had my characters, it was comparatively easy to work out the plot. Since Xiangzi is the main character, everything in the story must revolve around rickshaw pulling. As long as the people were linked in some way with the rickshaw, I had Xiangzi pinned down exactly where I wanted him."

13 Relating literature to psychoanalysis, Norman Holland introduces the concepts of "form as defense" and "meaning as defense".

See: HOLLAND, Norman, The Dynamics of Literary Response, New York, Columbia University Press, 1968, p. 105 "Virtually all the familiar entities of literature—plot, character, and form — serve at least partly as defensive modifications of unconscious content."

14 Similar issues wrere throroughly discussed by Thomas Pavel.

See: PAVEL, Thomas, Fictional Worlds, Cambridge/Massachusets, Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 145 —"Creation of distance could well be assumed to be the most general aim of imaginary activity: the journey epitomizes the basic operation of the imagination, be it realized as dreams, ritual trance, poetic rupture, imaginary worlds, or merely the confrontation of the unusual and memorable."

Also see: BESSIÉRE, Jean, Dire le Littéraire: Points de Vues Théoriques, Bruxelles, Mardaga, 1990 — The author also discusses all these questions of duality, distancing, double meaning, and so on.

Contrary to Bessière's book which deals with the literary in general, I discuss literary fiction only. Not all literature is fictional and not all fiction is literary or even artistic. I consider it important that my readers keep this distinction in mind.

15 BARTHES, Roland, et al, L'effet de réel, in "Littérature et Réalité", Paris, Seuil, 1982.

16 Similarly, a feminine reader, or a reader of feminine sensitivity, may cry towards the end of Tolstoi's Anna Karenina without ever having a chance to consider why she, or he, is crying over a fictive character. In fact it is because Anna Karenina stands for real women, including the reader herself. The latter does not have to interpret the text as, say, a label against patriarchal society in order to go through an emotiuonally active reception of the text.

See: PAVEL, Thomas, op. cit., pp. 55, 145 — where this example is brought up. According to the author the reader's reaction could be subsumed in the phrase: "Since this can happen to anyone, it can also happen to me." Naturally this is a simplification of a rather complex process of identification, transference, and so on, as studied by psychologists.

Also see: HOLLAND, Norman, op. cit. — Where the author analyses readers' response from a psychoanalytic point of view.

17 KURZWEIL, Edith - PHILLIPS, W., Art and Revolt, in "Writers and Politics: A Partisan Review Reader", London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983 [1st edition of the text, 1952].

18 JAUSS, Hans Robert, op., cit., pp. 92-111 — for a theoretical and historical examination of the concept of catharsis. Contrary to Jauss, who stresses the reconciliatory aspects of catharsis, I believe that with relation to reality's constraints catharsis can also be of a liberating kind.

See: LOSA, Margarida Lieblich, Para que serve o romance: Empenhamento, escapismo e catarse (What is the novel good for: Commitment, escapism and catharsis), in "Humanidades", Porto, Faculdade de Letras do Porto, (4) 1984, pp. 51-60.

19 LAO She, op. cit., p.233 [1945 Afterword].

20 PAVEL, Thomas, op. cit., p.55—Basing himself on Kendall Walton's essays the author writes: "Works of fiction are not mere sequences of sentences but props in game of make-believe, like children playing with dolls or pretending to be cowboys." For some reason Pavel does not mention Freud's comments, many years earlier on this connection.

See: FREUD, Sigmund, The relation of the poet to day-dreaming, in RIEFF, Philip, ed., "Character and Culture", New York, Macmillan - Collier, 1963, p.35 [1st edition of the text, 1908] — "Now the writer does the same as the child at play; he creates a world of phantasy which he takes very seriously; that is, he invests it with a great deal of affect, while separating it sharply from reality."

I would subsume the major universal themes of fictional literature under the single designation of compensatory fantasies, including therein even realistic literature if understood in the dialectical way I tried to explain in Part 1 (Why fictional literature is not to be read literally) of this paper.

Also see: MARTINS, Manuel Frias, Matéria Negra: Uma Teoria da Literatura e da Crítica Literária (Dark Matter: A Theory of Literature and Literary Criticism), Lisboa, Cosmos, 1993 — The author chose the concept "dark matter" to designate the 'underground', universal thematic source of all fictional literature.

I am indebted to him throughout my paper.

22 ISER, Wolfgang, op. cit., p.93 — "By means of this foreground-background relationship, the principle of selection exploits a basic condition for all forms of comprehension and experience, for the as yet unknown meaning would be incomprehensible were it not for the familiarity of the background it is set against."

23 PAVEL, Thomas, op. cit., p.145. See: Note 14 — For a partial citation.

24 Not necessarily between different geographic regions only. Also between different cultures within one and the same nation. Reverting to the case of Émile Zola mentioned in Part 1 (Why fictional literature is not to be read literally) of his paper, one can value the novel Germinal as a sort of embassy between bourgeois and working-class cultures within France. Most social realist writers wished to serve this purpose. Camel Xiangzi is another good example.

25 BAKHTIN, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination, Austin/ Texas, University of Texas Press, 1981; BAKHTIN, Mikhail, op. cit..

26 BARTHES, Roland, S/Z, Paris, Seuil, 1970 — The author used this same word "readable". In this essay Barthes analyses Balzac's Sarracine line by line after having included it in "littérature lisible" ("readable literature") as opposed to "littérature scriptible ""("writerly literature"). The later, more characteristic modern times, already presupposes the reader's active collaboration in the constitution of the final literary product.

27 The novel is saturated with the word "darkness", its derivatives and synonyms as I had occasion to discuss in my unpublished Master's Dissertation (Lisbon, 1970). A partial reformulation of the same is about to appear as an essay in the anthology Estudos Ingleses em Portugal, Coimbra, Minerva, [forthcoming-1997?].

It is well-known how concerned D.H. Lawrence was with having fiction restrict itself to the basic vital themes, also the most difficult to put into words.

28 See: Note 12 — for the edition used. This novel of the 1930's was previously translated into English as Rickshaw Boy.

29 DAMÁSIO, António, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, New York, Grosset - Putnam, 1994 — The author, a neurologist, reports on the findings that reveal how the affective component is indispensable for memory and reason to operate.

See: DAMÁSIO, António, O Erro de Descartes, Lisboa, Europa-América, 1995 — For the Portuguese edition.

* Ph. D. in Comparative Literature by the New York University, New York, USA. Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the Faculdade de Letras (Faculty of Arts) of the Universidade do Porto (University of Oporto), Oporto. Founding member of the Associação Portuguesa de Literatura Comparada (Portuguese Association of Comparative Literature), in existence since 1987, of which she became President in 1993. Member of the Executive Council of the International Association of Comparative Literature. Researcher on the nineteenth and twentieth century novel in Europe and the Amercicas, literary theory, literature and psychology and gender criticism. Author of numerous articles and publications on related topics.

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